How the liberal utopia of Portland became the center of a rightwing war in the US

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Meanwhile here in Washington state, we have a state senator Matt Shea who supports white nationalists as well. Seattle may be liberal, but go east of the mountains and you'll find far right people...

Meanwhile here in Washington state, we have a state senator Matt Shea who supports white nationalists as well. Seattle may be liberal, but go east of the mountains and you'll find far right people coming out of the woodworks.

This is so friggin' true. I'm happy people got to see a slice of Portland to some degree, but it was disappointing to see the show's effect on outsider's view of the place. It's not a quirky...

Portlandia was more a caricature than a portrait, and locals noted what it left out – rapid gentrification and displacement, increasing homelessness, the contentious policing of the Portland police bureau (PPB) and the long racist history in the Pacific north-west that made Portland the whitest major city in America.

This is so friggin' true. I'm happy people got to see a slice of Portland to some degree, but it was disappointing to see the show's effect on outsider's view of the place. It's not a quirky utopia of oddities, it's been super gentrified and homogenized into where it's at today, which is just one bland, sterile, upper-class shop after upper-class shop. And to see Fred Armisen drive down the new SE Division in Comedians in Cars and proclaim "this is Portland," is just like... no, buddy, that's not Portland. Portland's been ebbed out to make way for all that shit. Your show was fun for what it was, but it did not touch at all on its serious issues and instead just kinda made fun of people trying to be different.

Ask Portland’s mayor, Ted Wheeler [...] “I would say Portland has not changed. The impression that people get these days is that everywhere you go in Portland violence is breaking out all over the place. That couldn’t be further from the truth.”

It's not "further from the truth," we legit have a stabclock, and we've had 10 shootings in the past two weeks, not to mention the unlit molotov and the two attacks we've had on the waterfront as things ramp up to this Proud Boys crap. Wheeler has really been kind of a lame duck; his answers in this article just feel like he's trying his darnedest to downplay the situation as best he can so as to contain any fears, but his talk is always absent of anything pro-active.

Us locals just kind of think it became a center for right-wingers because they now feel empowered with the political climate where it is, and they just really want attention to make themselves martyrs, and are banking that Portland will be the place to make that happen. We're trying our darndest to ignore them, but they are certainly making it hard.

Ah yes, the liberal utopia of Portland, notorious for its intense and dangerous drug scene and skinheads just a few short decades ago, and the place responsible for making some of my LGBT friends...

Ah yes, the liberal utopia of Portland, notorious for its intense and dangerous drug scene and skinheads just a few short decades ago, and the place responsible for making some of my LGBT friends so intensely worried they won't even walk home without having someone on-call in the present one.

"How could someone be even remotely surprised by this," a discerning reader might wonder to his or herself. "Especially given that the writer seems to be based in Portland, for that matter!"

Oh, would you look at that? A quick perusing of his Guardian & twitter profiles reveals so wonderfully much! White. Checkmark. Guy. Checkmark. Straight to the point where the only article he's ever written about LGBT people was one about how they're voting for Donald J. Trump. Checkmark. Intensely Milquetoast moderate. Checkmark. Expat. Checkmark! That's an entire bingo, folks!

That's not very nice, Eva. My father was a kind, lovely man; and very white. He worked for an african government ministry, and personally risked life and limb to help 13-15 homosexuals from a...

White. Checkmark.
Guy. Checkmark.

That's not very nice, Eva. My father was a kind, lovely man; and very white. He worked for an african government ministry, and personally risked life and limb to help 13-15 homosexuals from a limitrophe country who were menaced with credible death threats over the border.

The point was obviously not '$colour_1 + $ sex_2 = bad', it was expressing a lack of surprise at a person who isn't personally affected by a problem completely being oblivious to the problems of...

The point was obviously not '$colour_1 + $ sex_2 = bad', it was expressing a lack of surprise at a person who isn't personally affected by a problem completely being oblivious to the problems of other people, and didn't imply that people of that make up are bad.

Strawmanning like "Any comment on how society allows people with a certain combination of traits to ignore the blight of others is anti-{trait}" tends to cause grief.